I'm done with Twilight...what now?

This is kind of a review, I guess - but mostly it's just me sharing my all-consuming enthusiasm for the Twilight series. For the past three and a half weeks, I have done nothing with my down time (little that I have) but read these books. I know I'm very late to the game on this; the first book came out in 2005, I think, and the fourth and final one came out a few months ago. I kept holding off because I didn't think I had time to read them, and I wasn't sure if I even wanted to read them, but two of my friends - my age - highly recommended them so I finally went for it. I'm actually really glad I didn't start reading them till now, because I could just go straight through all four books without stopping, or having to wait in suspense while I wondered what was going to happen next. I just had to close one and open the next one, and keep right on going.

These are the first books I've been REALLY into since Harry Potter. It was so fun to be so excited about a book series again! Although, I admit, I was a little embarrassed for being so wild about books that are essentially about teenage vampires and werewolves. I confess that I didn't make eye contact with the salespeople at the bookstores where I bought the books. If I'd been thinking, I would have gotten gift receipts so it would've looked like I was buying them for a little sister or a niece or something.

But now, whatever. I loved these books and I don't care who knows it!

One of my friends asked me what the appeal was...and I couldn't really explain it. The mythology in the books is really intriguing, but I can't really come up with some high-sounding literary reason why I was so completely absorbed in the story. I just loved the characters, loved the love story, and loved the idea of something so imaginative being set in someplace so ordinary. The idea of a super-hot vampire being completely devoted to you for eternity isn't bad, either. I think, though, that what really did it for me was kind of remembering what it was like to be in high school and fall in love for the first time (for me, the only time!), even though there were no vampires at my high school (to my knowledge).

I finished the fourth book, Breaking Dawn, late last night, and I have to say I was very satisfied. It wasn't even like when I read the last Harry Potter book and felt sad that I was never going to read more about Harry. With the ending of the Twilight series, I just felt like I'd read the whole story, the ending was nicely tied up, and I could now go on with my life knowing what happened to all these characters. I don't particularly feel like I need to read more about them, because I'm not really sure what else is left to say. I'm also a bit glad to be done because I've been living on very little sleep while I've been reading these books (staying up till past midnight on more than one occasion, even during the week), so it will be nice to be able to turn off my brain and go to bed at a decent hour again. And when I have finally gotten some sleep, I have been having a lot of dreams about vampires, so it's not particularly restful. Some of them have been combined with work dreams, which is very weird, but oh well. :) Still, I love books, and I can't say enough about books that make me want to sacrifice sleeping to read them.

I won't say that the books were all perfect; there were definitely times when the main character, Bella, annoyed the heck out of me with her dramatic behavior, but then I remembered that teenage girls are just dramatic, so it was probably an unavoidable part of the story. Overall, though, they are the best books I've read in a very long time - worth the hype, and worth staying up too late and trying to cram in chapters over breakfast before work.

I'm now waiting on one of my friends at work to finish reading the series (I just loaned her New Moon, and I'm taking her Eclipse and Breaking Dawn on Monday) so I have someone nearby to talk about the books with!!